As in all his subsequent dealings with France, Ho Chi Minh's demands were a model of modesty.

The police chief of Hiroshima welcomed me eagerly as the first Allied correspondent to reach the city.

Ho, or Nguyen Ai Quoc, thus became the first Vietnamese communist and a founding member of the French Communist party, born out of the split.

When you arrive in Hiroshima you can look around and for 25 and perhaps 30 square miles you can see hardly a building. It gives you an empty feeling in the stomach to see such man-made devastation.

Hiroshima had a profound effect upon me.

Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence.

Of thousands of others, nearer the centre of the explosion, there was no trace. They vanished. The theory in Hiroshima is that the atomic heat was so great that they burned instantly to ashes - except that there were no ashes.